One or more aspects of the present invention relate to the field of processing a message, such as a message communicated in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Many business processes rely on service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Such architectures facilitate the cooperation of computers over a network, such as the Internet, without requiring an agreed communication standard, e.g. message format, for communications between such computers.
Services are typically requested and deliverables are typically returned in the form of messages between computers or between software applications running on these computers to be more precise. Such messages may be generated in many different formats, which format for instance may depend on the platform and/or the programming language used to generate the message. Therefore, in order to be able to forward the message to an intended destination, e.g. a computer offering a particular service, the incoming message typically needs to be converted into a format that can be understood by its destination or at least the relevant information needs to be extracted from the incoming message.
To this end, the SOA typically comprises a message broker, which is a software module implementing the required message conversion or data extraction. The message broker typically has access to so-called message schemas, which define the structure and the type of content that each data field within the message can contain.
The message broker typically further comprises some flow logic, i.e. program code, which for instance may include routing information for routing the relevant contents of the message to the intended destination. For the message broker to successfully pass on the message or relevant contents thereof to an intended destination, the message broker typically requires one or more parsers that parse the incoming message based on the information provided by the message schema of that message.